The Secret of Power Couples – What They REALLY Are And Why They Matter

When you think of the phrase “power couple," who do you imagine? Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor? JFK and Jackie O? Cleopatra and Julius Caesar? There's a problem with our vision of what a power couple looks like. By default, we imagine two people who are already powerful coming together. Political couples like the Kennedys start with influence before joining forces. Leaders of Nations have the taxes they collect, which went together like Cleopatra and Caesar. If we're talking about truly powerful partnerships, maybe we should measure how influential they became after their together.

One could argue that Jay-Z and Beyonce are a much better example of a power couple with this measure. Jay-Z grew up relatively poor, and he began his life in the infamous Marcy housing projects amid Brooklyn's cocaine epidemic. And while Beyonce doesn't consider her upbringing poor, her Xerox Sales Executive father wasn't exactly in the same league as Caesar. Jay-Z and Beyonce got married in secret in 2008. When they took their nuptials, each had a net worth of just under $100 million. Fast-forward 14 years, dozens of Music Awards, and millions of dollars into revenue later, the couple is now worth about $1.8 billion. To put that kind of money in context, there are ghost towns in America that can be purchased online, most of which go for under $2 million. With Jay-Z and Beyonce's money, they could purchase and renovate half of all the ghost towns in the US and turn them into music utopias if they wanted. Hail Caesar indeed.

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There are 96 words for love in Sanskrit, most of which are about love for yourself, for God, and for romantic attraction. The Japanese language has words to describe dog lovers, love for a child, and the philanthropic love for one's fellow man. But only in Greek do we find pragma, the pragmatic love of the well-adjusted partnership. Pragma is when a couple learns to make compromises over time. You do the dishes, and I'll do the garbage because those are the chores each of us can stand. Pragma is tolerance of each other's little flaws and celebrating each other’s minor victories. Pragma is making an effort. In short, of all the words for love, pragma is partnership. And partnerships are how we make power couples. That's what today's episode is about - pragma and partnership. And we have a few myths to go with our new words.

Myth One: Men Are from Mars. Women Are from Venus. At least that's what the 90s would have us believe. So, what's the real state of partnership today?

Joe: Partnership in a relationship came up a couple of times on our dock. I kept trying to remove it, and it kept appearing. So, Todd, why did you want to do this episode?

Todd: Years ago, I went to a speech, and I was really excited at the time. Have you ever read the book The Millionaire Next Door? It's a best-selling book; The gist of it is how they're real average millionaires among us in every neighborhood in America. So, I go to this speech, and the guy (doctor) gets up there and he kind of stands up in his suit. And he goes, you want to know how to be a millionaire? Don't get divorced! And everybody laughed. Then he broke down the math of it and why that is. I always made a joke about that and told people this story my whole life. But then, as I've gotten older, I look at it little differently and started to see how important choosing your partner is…how the wrong partner is cancer, and the right partner can take you to places well beyond what you can do on your own. So that's why it's a burning desire for me.

Joe: I think the thing that appeals to me the most is the exercise mentally of picking a partner among the people you know. Guys play this game all the time. Like, there's that stupid game: fuck, marry, kill. We don't ever have the game of who would you marry, kill, and then go into business with.

Todd: Well, I can say that there's no successful man that I've ever seen who doesn't have a great partner. I'll give you a prime example. An extreme example is President Bill Clinton. Without his powerful wife, he wouldn't have been President. He would just be some dude on a golf course somewhere.

Joe: Absolutely. From what we've read about Presidents, most of them wouldn't have become Presidents without their wives. Once I dug into this and started looking at numbers and what you can expect, and how we actually match up, this seemed like more and more of a valuable thought exercise. I think we should all teach kids to play that marry, kill, business game instead. Who would you pick? Don't think of it as necessarily marrying out of love. Don't think of it necessarily as marrying out of attraction. Pretend you are your own aging aunt in like some arranged marriage culture, and you're setting yourself up for success in the future.

There is a Forbes interview where Warren Buffett and Jay-Z went out to lunch and talked about how they see eye to eye on a lot of business models. His big one though is Jay-Z has the business model of never making someone else rich with your brand or your image. And that is a value that his wife shares and one not many others use in the entertainment industry. Jay-Z's model is don't do something for someone else's business; always build your own brand. So, I just wanted to point that out because our whole episode revolves around the idea that Jay Z is a brilliant business manager, and then he got with an amazing wife – amplifying each other like fire and gasoline.

Before we get to how to do it, let’s start with how to do it wrong. I'm going to ask an embarrassing question, and I apologize in advance. Let's talk about times we've picked the wrong partner. We know divorce will basically cut your finances in half, but what does it really look? Now, Todd got divorced in his mid-late 30s and then went through a pre-midlife crisis where he was dating women that were a lot younger than him. And those were doomed from the very start, yet he couldn't see that until he got older. Often, when a younger person dates an older person, it's for financial help. You think that it's true love, but it's really not; it's just true need. Maybe that could be the first unofficial myth.

As for Joe and dating, his mistake was not matching values with people. When discussing finding the wrong partner, some of it is practical, like finances, knowing where each other stands, and knowing how to build each other up. Most mistakes in the past in choosing a partner have been finding someone who doesn't share the same values. For instance, Joe looks for academic truth and enjoys writing fiction to an obsessive degree. When dating, they would talk about how much they like to learn or that they were really interested in the stuff that I wanted to talk about. Come to find out, they were more interested in the stuff they had learned in college and high school when they were forced to read and learn. But in their adult years, they didn't share that value. They lost that childlike curiosity and desire to continuously learn. This is a nice segue into our first myth that we're going to bust – the idea that opposites attract, or even worse, the whole thing about men being from Mars and women being from Venus.

The part in that book that sticks out to me is supposedly men only speak fifty thousand words a day and women and double that. I don't remember the exact number, but it was debunked a couple of years back. That wasn't true. I think there is some good soul advice in there and better ways to approach a relationship mindfully, so I will give it credit for that. One of which was don't be a fixer in relationships as a man. That said, one of the first things we want to debunk is the idea that people with opposite values come together. We mentioned at the beginning that the brainy gal gets with the slob. We have that ingrained in our psyche, but the opposites attract notion generally isn't true.

Myth Two: What about lopsided partnerships? The wealthy millionaire and the gold digger or the brainy wife and the slop? Can these become power couples?

I'm going to harken back to a study we've covered before. It came from the University of Notre Dame by sociologist Elizabeth McClintock, and she looked at the data from about 1,500 couples in different stages of the partnership. Basically, the trophy wife is a total myth; usually, if an economically successful man gets with a beautiful woman, she probably already has some money. So, money makes it easier to stay beautiful and on the other part of it, the man clearly is making money, like he's done something in life to earn it or to inherit it. That makes total sense because I think high achievers will not hang out in a place without other high achievers around. That's their proximity.

Generally, you are looking at women who come from high socioeconomic status. They may not make as much, possibly because of the gender gap, possibly because they reach the ceiling of what their degree can get them. And then they just get with the guy that has the same value as them. And if they value money, well, then you're just having to people who are good with money get together. So, when you see an older man with a younger woman, their value is money and pairing up with somebody who is already economically successful does not mean they're both not successes in some way. They were both probably financially successful before that even happened, but we don't see the woman's success. We just see an attractive woman with an old guy who's graying, and they both have cash. Yet we roll out eyes and say gold digger. All in all, nice guys generally pair with nice women, people whose value is academia and intelligence. The same goes for people who value money, etc. Everyone kind of value matches.

Now, on the same token, do you think men and women are attracted to the same things?

I think women are attracted to fun and entertainment, and I think men are more attracted by stuff and sex. As life advice you once told me, when you have a gal, you have to bring them to whatever stage you're on to impress them. Whatever you do in life that you're good at. You have to let them see you be good at that thing. And having a genuine interest. When we look at these power couples, we're going to see that the values match. The behaviors don't always match, but the core values match.

I've heard my jerk friends talk about how women are only attracted to how funny you are. I've heard myths like women only care about money. I've also heard myths to the other way, like guys only care about looks. Well, I found a neat study by Stephen Whyte from Queensland University in Australia. They studied 7,325 Australians who were using a dating website, ages 18 to 65. They were asked to rate things on a scale of 0 to 100 and these fell into three categories: aesthetics, resources, and personality.

This study found that we assume men are all about looks and women are all about money. Those are the ugliest functions. This study found that women and men have the exact same desires; intelligence, education, and income are high for both. They rated personality as highly as men did. They even rated aesthetics as highly as men did. However, the difference came with their ages. Women rated the importance of age, education, intelligence, trust, income, and emotional connection 9 to 14 points higher than men, especially earlier in life. Men prioritized attractiveness and physical build earlier than women.

According to the study, both sexes tend to find the same things sexy in a potential mate, but at different stages in life. That may be why certain people like older men and younger women. Sometimes that is a good match. I'm going to quote a totally non-scientific thing called the kruger effect. It is the idea that older women and younger men are both at a stage in their life where physical attraction and aesthetics means the most. We think these things are like quarks or phenomena of sexuality. They're actually features; they just have those same values matching at that current moment – the perfect match, making timing everything.

Everyone thinks the dating world as absolute chaos, where it's just young men and older women and older men and younger women, but sometimes people match up, and it isn't chaos at all. It's just we're all attracted to generally the same things. We prioritize them depending on the stage of life we are in and are attracted towards somebody who has the same values as us. If we don't find that, we move on. So, my takeaway from all this data is if you look for somebody with similar values, you will be successful. If that won't make you rich and successful, maybe you should change your values, not your partners.

Myth Three: Finally, how do we pick a power partner early before either becomes too big? Is it problematic to even think that way?

Jay-Z and Beyonce were creative partners before. They were like business partners. We know what it looks like when two creative powerhouses get together and go from 0 to 2 billion together - when we have people who are financially minded get together. I think a lot of being a power couple is getting through hard times together. Good times and bad times. And I think that's the nicest thing about a partner, to have someone to have that shield and shelter even though you have the same values; that person who always has your back because your stakes are as high. That's something we learned from reading about the Gottman Institute, be positive with a partner and look at hurdles as obstacles.

Can we address the elephant in the conversation? We started this episode with how do we pick a good partner? We finally put that myth to bed, the idea that you are picking a partner and that you're not just like making yourself ready to be a good partner.

Can we ask this – Why is it that the women always choose and then the men always attract a good partner? Women are technically doing the choosing because men, we brag about how we got somebody. Yeah, but in reality, they've been watching us for a while, and they decided to give us a chance. I've watched nature documentaries. I know that when birds mate, it's always the male bird who builds the nest and does the dance and brings rocks to the Penguin. And yeah, the guys do a bunch of stuff to seem like a good mate.

So, for this one, we will reference the Northwest Universities Marriage 101 Class. I think this class should be standard in every college and high school. It is a foundation course based on correcting a misconception that if your partnership is going to work, you got to find the right person. The person who teaches this class says, you basically must be the right person. We go into relationships thinking that we're going to have you fix each other, but that is not the case. You both need to come together, each of you ready to be a whole complete person. And then you join forces and conquer the world. In this class, which you would think would be all about how to play matchmaker, they make students journal, and we know the power of journaling. They're forced to discuss their own triggers, reactions, and hot buttons. They make them examine this first: what am I blind to? What problems can this cause if I was with somebody else?

So that's stage one of the class. They have moments of self-discovery. They make them examine their past and their family. Then they move on to solve those issues in a couple setting, not looking at it as a zero-sum game. Where one of you is going to win, and one of you will lose. Near the end of this course, they seem to focus on this should be two people standing together, looking at a problem and trying to solve it. They emphasize the idea that you should be solving problems together. And that you should be a problem-solving couple, not a couple that has problems with each other. One of our biggest myths about love is that we're good communicators.

So, we should be totally cool in a relationship. But being in a relationship means almost being your own parent and watching yourself. I'm just going to also reference the golden rule: If you can't think of how to solve the problem, always couple every one negative comment you make with five good ones. In the end, being a good power couple almost means just being able to monitor yourself, be your own parent and say, would I want to be with me as a partner at this moment? If you can do that, if you have good values, and if you have values that you are aware of, then you should have no problem finding somebody who shares that value and can parent themselves as well.

When we had our opening, we talked about JFK and Jackie O. I used to view them as my model power couple until we did this episode. In our minds, they already had all their power before they came together. For one more real power couple, think of Tom and Judy Love. I guarantee you probably bought one of their products in one of their stores before. Tom and Judy met young. Tom was a great athlete who dropped out of college and went to the Marines, got out, and dropped out of college again. And Tom and Judy invested in a business at a time when it was very undesirable. It was the convenience gasoline business, and it was in the early 70s. There was a gas shortage, so gas stations weren't making any money at all; you could lease them for literally nothing.

Now, in the early 70s, gas stations were different, which sometimes had service centers where they fixed cars. They didn't have convenience stores in them. That was a different business. So, you went to convenience stores to get food or to a grocery store. So, what they did was they put in the Reese's Cups, the Snickers, the sodas, the cigarettes, and all that; they combined the gas station with a store, and it boomed. It was the first snack-based convenience store. They grew it into hundreds of stores. Now, they have a net worth of $5 billion. And their convenience stores are around today, and they are called Loves. I know everyone listening to this has seen or been to one of their stores. Combination of great timing and a true power couple.

Final Thoughts

The world of self-help is a mountain of life advice built on the assumption that you're making decisions for yourself. Only add assets to your portfolio, says Rich, Dad, Poor Dad. Set your mind on a definite goal so you can grow rich and adapt to change, says Who Moved My Cheese. You know what self-help rarely mentions? It doesn't matter how wealthy, agile, or goal-oriented you are…a messy divorce will cut that in half.

Even if you don't get divorced, an anchor of a partner will limit your personal potential, whereas a partner who shares your values and motivations will multiply it together. In the opening narrative, we talked about the shape of power couples throughout history: Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Franklin D, Roosevelt and Eleanor, and JFK and Jackie O. No, you know what those people had in common? Not wealth. One or both were assassinated or died in office. Power partnerships don't come to the table with money, fame, or influence. Real power partners come together over values, and they reinforce those values while helping each other prosper - reaching a ripe old age together.

Hail Caesar, indeed.